what used to be is now gone and overgrown with grass
by annaskorlov
Summary: "Any lengths that Fitz or Ward could go to with a parachute are not enough to reverse the fact that Simmons is now a study in terminal velocity, and Fitz does not wish to calculate the time it will take for her to strike the water. (He cannot help doing so.)" F.Z.Z.T. AU.


**что было, то прошло и быльём поросло; ****_what used to be is now gone and overgrown with grass_**

**_—_**

The method by which she leaves him is both short and particularly brutal, on all accounts.

Brutal, in that it is by her own means — she hits him with the extinguisher hard, yes, but his eyes are still_ just_ barely open enough to see her take off running for the lowered ramp without him.

His heart throws itself viciously in his chest when she turns back to him for the final time; she doesn't catch his eyes until he's truly screaming, the full knowledge that she's too far to hear him pounding in his ears. He cries out for her anyway. Hands in fists at the glass. But her resolve is strong, already, too strong, — he used to admire this in her, he _used_ to — and the glass therefore might as well be several feet thick. Anguish pulls his eyes wide, and he keeps them on her. He watches her register the pain and confusion written across him, but still she does not step back.

(He will be crying out for her for the rest of his life.)

He does not want to see this. He cannot afford to look away.

The lines around her eyes set themselves in determination. She mouthes something that could be _I'm sorry _or _I love you_ at him — and they are very often the same thing — and throws herself, almost _gently_, if that is possible, from the plane. Except that it's more of a simple ceasing of her resistance, a surrendering to the inevitable, than any proaction.

He keeps his eyes on her for as long as he can. It's cruel, and desperate, and not a terribly extended length of time. Until the wind pulls her under the plane and, irrevocably, out of sight.

And any lengths that he and Ward could go to with a parachute are not enough to reverse the fact that she is now a study in terminal velocity, a research paper entitled _how fast can a falling girl echo her cries off the sea; _alternately,_ one quick and easy step to sever a mobius strip_. Fitz does not wish to calculate the time it takes for her to strike the water before sinking. (He cannot help doing so.)

Ward throws himself out, in the end, but it is not enough.

—

When they fish Ward from the sea hours later, sans-Simmons, Fitz does not look at the cargo ramp.

He walks in measured steps not to his own bedroom, but to hers, and puts his head down on the indent left in her pillow just this morning. It smells everything like springtime and nothing like him, but in minutes his senses adapt and he can no longer taste her perfume in the back of his throat on every third breath. Waves crash in the distance, somewhere close and far off, and he does not cry until nighttime.

He does not leave this room, either, even when Coulson, and May, and Ward, and Skye, and, eventually, his parents, come for him.

—

As it turns out, he is built wrong for life with half a name. Two weeks in, Skye calls for _Fitzsimmons _and it feels like slow-strangling. A sudden tension stills every breath in the room, until Ward takes her gently by the arm and pulls her away.

—

There is, obviously, no body for them to bury. _This is a good thing_, Fitz tells himself. He does not want to know what she looks like without a heartbeat. And he does not sit through her funeral, because there is nothing that could possibly be said about this girl with the sunshine smile that he does not already know.

Sci-Ops erects a monument with a metal plaque and salutes, cold marble features that look nothing like Jemma and everything like the day she jumped.

There's still a grave, though, and he takes a leave of absence from the field long enough to visit often. Mrs. Simmons had asked him to pick the spot — _you always were the one who knew her best, out of all of us_ — and so the white stone marker rests in the shade of a Japanese maple tree, dappled by sunlight in the afternoon hours.

Under her name and the years of her life, it reads as follows:

**_Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo. _**

_Resolute in action, gentle in manner._

It would have made her blush, and this is how he knows it is altogether fitting.

He tells her so, and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that, wherever she is, she hears him.

(Eventually, cradled at the roots of the tree, breathing starts to come easier.)


End file.
